Damn! He hated this sneaking-around kind of stuff.
The light changed and traffic began flowing. Remo followed on foot, ignoring the honking behind him from the drivers stuck behind his rental. Chiun was on the streets, as well, glimpsed like a phantom's shadow on the far side of the street as they glided after the limo, off the main artery and onto a four-lane street lined on both sides with storefronts. Traffic was much lighter and the curbs were solid with parked vehicles.
Good place for an ambush, Remo thought, and a moment later the ambush commenced.
It was a smelly affair. There was a brief flash of light from the front end of the limo, then Remo smelled smoke, and the smoke became noxious. He slowed his breathing as the vapor turned into airborne acid.
He saw the plan now. Of course it didn't need to be a big explosive. Just enough to flush out the prey. The limousine screeched to a stop and doors burst open on both sides. Remo rushed into the street and grabbed the hacking Secret Service agent who had collapsed half in, half out. Remo dragged him free of the limo and sent him rolling across the sidewalk. Pedestrians were fleeing the gas on foot.
Remo inserted himself in the limo and found a pile of bodies on the floor, three choking agents atop the choking senator.
Remo had enough breath for a quick sarcastic comment. "Good plan," he told the agents as he shoved them off. "Suffocate the man when he's already short on breathable air."
The white sedan slowed alongside the open limo doors as Remo unearthed the senator. The driver's window opened. Remo saw a man in black, with a white ski mask and a white hood. The man smiled and dropped something on the pavement.
Remo might have had time to extricate himself from the car and get to the grenade—but not without shoving agents out of his way with deadly force, he decided. Instead he twisted himself and the senator out of the open door on the opposite side, and he felt the pressure waves coming at him. Too fast. There had to have been a one-second fuse on the device. There was no time to get himself and the others to real safety.
The blast engulfed them.
32
The senator from California found himself on the sidewalk, finally able to breathe again despite the smoke from the limo.
"My feet hurt."
"I bet they do."
"What happened?"
"They tricked you into opening the doors. If you'd have kept them closed, the grenade wouldn't have hurt anybody."
Senator Herbert Whiteslaw's feet hurt so much he had to see what was wrong with them, despite the vivid scene in front of him. He looked down, was dizzy for a moment and found himself looking at two black things in an inflatable children's swimming pool. The black things were his feet. He was sitting on a plastic chair in front of a small hardware store. The glass storefront had blown inward and left the kiddie pool undamaged.
"Sorry. I didn't have time to get you fully under cover."
"Who are you?" the senator asked the man who, he realized, had just departed, fast.
The man was back in a moment with a Secret Service agent. The agent was burned, as well, more extensively but not seriously, it seemed. The agent rolled his eyes in relief when the man sat him down in the children's pool.
"Who are you?" the senator asked again.
The man was gone again. The senator remembered dark eyes. Not the eyes of a man who saved people, when he thought about it, but cruel eyes. Appearances were deceiving, he decided, and by then the man was back again. The driver in his arms, who was a massive brute of an agent who had chosen the service after his pro wrestling career fizzled, was being carried without effort. His body was limp and his suit was smoldering.
"Is he dead?" the senator asked.
"No, just bonked his head." The ex-wrestler was placed in the pool with his head leaning against the inflated palm tree that emerged from one end.
"Don't let him drown," the man instructed the other agent and the senator. On the next trip he carried another limp figure, burned superficially across his entire back. When he was placed in the kiddie pool the water sloshed out over the top.
"We'll need another pool," the conscious agent observed stupidly.
"No, we won't," said Remo.
"There's more agents," the agent insisted.
"There's not," Remo said. "Not anymore."
He'd done all he could. Remo strolled down to the end of the block, ignoring the senator's questions, to where the white sedan was parked. There were crowds a few hundred feet away, but the rumors of a gas attack were keeping them at a distance for now. Sirens were approaching.
"What do we have here?" Remo asked.
"A nothing," Chiun explained. "A worm or a snail or some other low level of life-form."
Chiun stood alongside the car, which had a dead man in the passenger seat and a wide-eyed paralyzed man at the wheel. The paralyzed man sought mercy from Remo Williams.
"He is the boom dropper," Chiun explained, not looking at the driver.
"And the sidekick?"
"He is the foul talker. You should have heard his language."
"I won't swear, I swear," the driver whined.
"Hope you've got something to tell me," Remo said, "such, as, where's the rest of the guys?"
"Guys?"
"You know. The guys. Your buds. The rest of the gang. We've shut down White Hand cells in Chicago and Colorado and San Fran and those losers in Kansas. There's always a bunch of you."
"There was just the two of us for the D.C. job."
"Bulldookey."
"It isn't bulldookey," the driver cried, rolling his eyes like a beaten dog.
"Little Father, did you hear what he just said?"
"Yes."
"I said bulldookey! Just like you!"
"I'm allowed."
"It's not a swear word!"
"It means 'motherfucker' in Korean," Remo explained.
The driver's head was flopping around in panic and he even made an attempt to shift the car into Drive with his teeth, which toppled him on the steering wheel.
"Company's coming," Remo pointed out as the first squad car came around the corner, siren screaming, and braked fast. The officers jumped out of the vehicle and aimed their weapons at Remo and Chiun.
"Don't shoot. They saved us." It was the senator on the lawn chair. The cops got a good look at the blackened bodies in the kiddie pool and they boggled.
"I shall kill this one and we may be on our way," Chiun announced for the driver's benefit. The driver, now trapped in place staring at the remains of his former partner, started talking.
The cops tried to figure out what to do, until the Secret Service arrived and tried to figure out what to do, but the Service looked more intimidating during their decision-making process. Finally the ambulances began pouring in and the EMTs more or less took over, stabilizing the burn victims. The Walter Reed ambulance took the senator, with two high-ranking Secret Service agents insisting on coming along. The phone call came in as soon as the doors closed.
"Spacey," answered the more senior agent, then he nodded to his partner. "HSCC with the CO."
"Okay"
For the HSCC—High Security Conference Call— the two agents dialed their phones into a security system that took them through the highest level of electronic screening and encryption. When it was all done their commanding agent was back on the line.
"Agent Spacey, Agent Nor?"
"Yes, sir."
"The next voice you hear will be the President's. Understood?"
"Yes, sir."
The next voice they heard was the President's, and the President gave a very strange set of instructions.
It would have been a big joke except for two things. One, Secret Service agents never, ever joked. Two, the encryption of the phone call was reserved for the highest-security concerns.